Suicide by setting fire to oneself. You hear about it in the media occasionally. It is an act of protest, a sacrifice, usually stemming from political or ideological convictions (for instance the Czech student Jan Pallach in 1969, the Viet Nam monk Quang Duc in 1963 and, more recently, the two Kurdish asylum seekers). However, perhaps it occurs even more often out of total desperation with people who have been declared 'mentally unstable' by a psychiatric diagnosis. You seldom hear anything about that. With 'For a better world/Not dark yet' Mathilde ter Heijne has made a CD-ROM around well-known and less well-known incidents of this form of suicide. The source material includes documentary reports and a number of case studies. Whatever the differing backgrounds and motivations, fire is fire and this must be one of the most extreme ways of ending one's own life. The CD-ROM gives you a glimpse of the world in which it takes place. Stories, facts, image and sound fragments form parts of a drawn space which again, consist of other drawn spaces. Using a pencil, Ter Heijne made scratchy letters, walls, depths and clouds of smoke you have to navigate through. The media fragments are behind these layers. Clicking on a hotspot will activate a fragment of videofilm or sound recording. Move the cursor and you glide through a seemingly 'air-tight' space until you suddenly find yourself in another space. The pencil-black and pencil-clouds take you to pencil-texts and pencil-sketches of charred bodies, and photos upon which you can zoom in and out. The journey you take is not always clear; it is as though a smoke screen is being consciously held up. You might be held prisoner for a time in a space from which no escape seems possible. Whether this is caused by technical defects or is intentional is irrelevant; the oppressive effect is not out of place here.
The oppressiveness is still evident when you are forced to listen again and again to a raving, beseeching male voice addressing the world: '[...]Where am I when I am not in the real world and not in my imagination.' He cannot live both in his head and in his body at the same time. He cannot bear the world's fragmentation and asks what meaning our health and freedom have if we do not dare to see the sickness in the eyes. Thus speaks a madman. But let us describe the madman here as someone who is critical of his surroundings but is not being taken seriously any more, precisely because he speaks a truth nobody wants to hear. 'What kind of world is this when a madman has to tell you to be ashamed of yourself.' Torch youself, and leave this darkened world. And, cleansed by fire, become as light again as the air. Act of hysteria or unsurpassable courage - Ter Heijne makes no judgement on this. She only lets you in so you can see that it happens. Then you can ask questions for which there are no sensible answers. But they still must be asked at times, for there is a reason behind everything.
– Esma Moukhtar
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